Memoir of Jane Austen

by Austen-Leigh, James Edward; Sutherland, Kathryn;

  Miss Bigg… Robert Southey: JA’s letter is to Alethea Bigg whose sister Catherine was married to Southey’s uncle. See note to p. 110 above.

  three days before… her last work: the reference is to the unfinished novel now known as Sanditon. According to the date at the top of the first page of the manuscript (now in King’s College, Cambridge), JA began writing on 27 January 1817. The tradition in the family was that she intended to call it ‘The Brothers’, but Anna, who inherited the manuscript fragment, is calling it ‘Sanditon’ in a letter of 1862 (see Appendix). JEAL refers to it as ‘The Last Work’ and adopts that phrase for the title of ch. 13 of Ed.2 of the Memoir, in which he includes extracts amounting to about one-sixth of the total. As late as 1925, when R. W. Chapman first published the fragment in its entirety, it was still ‘Fragment of a Novel’.

  ‘My Dear Alethea’: extracts from no. 150 in Letters. JEAL omits other family news from the letter he prints in order to focus attention more steadily on JA’s health.

  I am convinced: JA wrote ‘I am more & more convinced’ (Letters, 326–7).

  a good account of his father: Jane’s eldest brother James was in poor health and died in December 1819.

  between Streatham and Winchester: Alethea Bigg lived in Winchester with her widowed sister Mrs Elizabeth Heathcote, and was at this time visiting their other sister Mrs Catherine Hill in Streatham.

  ‘Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’: 1816, by Robert Southey, nephew of Catherine (Bigg) Hill’s husband, the Revd Herbert Hill. Southey’s beloved son Herbert died aged 9 in April 1816, soon after the poem with its proem celebrating domestic contentment was completed.

  to her niece: Caroline Austen. The extract is from the closing section of a longer letter (no. 149), where it reads: ‘I feel myself getting stronger than I was half a year ago, & can so perfectly well walk to Alton, or back again, without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when Summer comes’ (Letters, 326).

  of the niece: again Caroline Austen, slightly altered in wording from her recollections printed here as MAJA, (178–9).

  Mrs Leigh Perrot… late husband’s affairs: see notes to p. 120. Caroline’s father, James Austen, was to be the chief beneficiary of his uncle James Leigh Perrot’s will, but subject to the widow’s life interest; as it turned out, she survived him by sixteen years.

  Mr. Lyford: Giles King Lyford (1764–1837), surgeon-in-ordinary at the County Hospital, Winchester. His father and uncle were also surgeons in Basingstoke and Winchester. Mr Lyford had already been called in and his treatment yielded some temporary relief while JA was still at Chawton (Letters, 340).

  in College Street: at no. 8 College Street (still to be seen), where a Mrs David offered lodgings.

  There is no better way, my dearest E.: no. 160 in Letters, to JEAL, then at Exeter College, Oxford. JA wrote: ‘I know no better way my dearest Edward.’

  Charles: Edward Austen Knight’s eighth child, then a pupil at Winchester College.

  William: William Heathcote, Elizabeth (Bigg) Heathcote’s son and JEAL’s boyhood friend.

  a letter… before printed: no. 161, for which see note to p. 120 above. This extract, like the former, is known only from its earlier publication in Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818, where the wording is slightly different (see p. 142 in this edition).

  her sister-in-law, my mother: Mary Lloyd Austen, whose memories of the deathbed are woven into Caroline’s account in MAJA, 179–82.

  two of her brothers… clergymen: James and Henry.

  she amused them even in their sadness: a reference to ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’, a set of comic verses written by JA three days before her death, and so her last literary work. Cf. Henry Austen: ‘The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour’ (‘Biographical Notice’, p. 138). The younger generation were uncomfortable with the idea of publishing such frivolous verses as JA’s deathbed production, and Henry’s embarrassing reference to the verses, described by Caroline Austen, as late as 1871, as an unlucky allusion, was removed from his ‘Memoir’ of 1833, perhaps under family pressure. See Caroline’s letter appended to this edition at pp. 190–1; and Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen’s Verses and Lord Stanhope’s Disappointment’, Book Collector, 37 (1988), 86–91. The verses were first printed in Sailor Brothers, 272–3. R. W. Chapman includes them in Minor Works, 450–2, from a manuscript version possibly in James Austen’s hand but under his own title ‘Venta’ (the Roman name for Winchester). Doody and Murray offer a version of the text, from a second manuscript (they speculate it is Cassandra’s hand, from JA’s dictation, now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library), in Catharine and Other Writings, 246.

  ‘a kind sister to me, Mary’: these and JA’s last words are recorded in Caroline’s account, presumably from Mary Lloyd Austen’s witnessing of the final moments (MAJA, 182). They are the more poignant for the reservations JA felt towards James’s second wife, partly on account of her ungenerous treatment of Anna, James’s daughter by his first wife. As recently as 22 May, JA had noted in her letter to her old friend Anne Sharp, former governess at Godmersham, that Mary ‘is in the main not a liberal-minded Woman’ (Letters, 340–1). Mary had been nursing JA for perhaps a month or more, as James’s June letter to JEAL at Oxford makes clear (Life & Letters, 392–3). JEAL’s restrained account of the deathbed, at which he was not present, can also be supplemented by Cassandra’s stoical and tender letter, written only two days after, on 20 July 1817, to her niece Fanny Knight (Letters, 343–6). JEAL was presumably ignorant of this letter’s existence.

  had actually destroyed… facilitated: cf. Caroline Austen to JEAL, 1 April [1869?], writing to encourage him in compiling the Memoir: ‘I am very glad dear Edward that you have applied your-self to the settlement of this vexed question between the Austens and the Public. I am sure you will do justice to what there is—but I feel it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of sight by the past generation’ (see the Appendix, pp. 186–7).

  the happiest individuals… have no history: cf. ‘for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history’, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), book 6, ch. 3; and Proverbs 49.

  prefixed to these pages: a reference to the passage from Sir Arthur Helps, The Life of Columbus (1869), used as epigraph to the Memoir.

  Miss Mitford… Life, vol. i. p. 305: see note to p. 13 above. Mitford in a letter of 3 April 1815, to Sir William Elford. The passage continues: ‘and a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of “single blessedness” that ever existed, and that, till “Pride and Prejudice” showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everyone is afraid’ (The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. L’Estrange (1870), i. 305–6). Mitford does, however, qualify the description a few lines later when she observes that the friend from whom she has it is, owing to a family legal dispute, not on good terms with the Austens. The further postscript, detailing Mitford’s accusation and JEAL’s rejoinder, appeared in Ed.1 but was omitted from Ed.2. R. W. Chapman restored it in his 1926 reprint of Ed.2.

  HENRY AUSTEN, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ (1818)

  The ‘Biographical Notice’ has a special importance as the first attempt to provide the public with the details of the novelist’s life, presenting her by name in its opening page, though not on the title-page, as the author of S&S, P&P, MP, and E. Written within months of JA’s death, it was prefixed to the posthumously published NA and P (issued late in December 1817, dated 1818). JEAL drew on details from this short notice in his Memoir as well as using it as the sole authority for one of JA’s latest letters. The ‘Biograph
ical Notice’ has remained widely known in the twentieth century, through its reprinting in R. W. Chapman’s continuously available Oxford edition of The Novels of Jane Austen (1923).

  Jane Austen’s fourth brother, Henry (1771–1850), had a colourful and varied career. After St John’s College, Oxford, he took up soldiering with the Oxford Militia, was later partner in a London banking firm, was declared bankrupt in March 1816, and in December 1816 became a clergyman in the Church of England. He acted informally as Jane Austen’s literary agent. According to family tradition, he was Jane Austen’s favourite brother.

  D’Arblay and… Edgeworth: Fanny or Frances Burney (see note to p. 20 above); and Maria Edgeworth (note to p. 72 above), both contemporary women novelists much admired by JA.

  stanzas replete… and vigour: Henry Austen’s reference to the comic verses ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’, written by JA on her deathbed, caused the next generation of the family much discomfort. This may explain why the reference is excised from his ‘Memoir’ of 1833. The verses were not published until 1906. See note to p. 130 above.

  her eloquent blood… her modest cheek: paraphrasing John Donne, ‘her pure and eloquent blood | Spoke in her cheeks’, from ‘Of the Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary’ (1612), 11 244–5.

  Gilpin on the Picturesque: William Gilpin (1724–1804), author of Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1792).

  Johnson in prose… Fielding quite so high: see notes to p. 71 above, where JEAL appears to be drawing on Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’.

  ‘What should I do, my dearest E.’: from a letter to James Edward Austen, 16 December [1816]. For the full text, see Letters, no. 146. and Memoir, pp. 122–4 above, where JEAL quotes more extensively from the same letter, written to him by his aunt.

  a letter… before her death: a letter known only from its publication here by Henry Austen. JEAL subsequently draws on it, at pp. 120 and 130 above.

  HENRY AUSTEN, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833)

  This is a rewriting by Henry Austen of his ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818. Much of the original information remains, but there are omissions, alterations, and additions. Henry Austen provided the new memoir to accompany Sense and Sensibility, published by Richard Bentley as No. 23 in his ‘Standard Novels’ series, dated 1833. Bentley had recently bought from Henry and Cassandra Austen, as joint proprietors, the copyrights of the five novels (the exception was P&P) which had remained in JA’s ownership at her death (Austen Papers, 286–7), and he was now preparing the first edition of her works since 1818. Henry subjoins to the memoir the date ‘October 5. 1832’, and in a letter to Bentley of 4 October he describes it as ‘A biographical sketch of the Authoress, which is to supersede that already publishd’. He continues: ‘I heartily wish that I could have made it richer in detail but the fact is that My dear Sister’s life was not a life of event. Nothing like a journal of her actions or her conversations was kept by herself or others.’ (For the full text of the letter, see Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen: New Biographical Comments’, Notes and Queries, 237 (1992), 162–3.) Bentley continued to issue Henry Austen’s revised memoir in separate and collected edition printings of S&S until 1869, after which it was rendered redundant by his publication of JEAL’s substantial Memoir. Intended to replace the ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818, the fate of the 1833 memoir since the late nineteenth century has been quite the opposite. Regularly assumed by critics to be merely a reprint of the earlier piece (Brian Southam dismisses it as a ‘slightly altered version’, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 1811–70 (1968), 16), it saw no reprinting between the 1880s and 1997 and has largely dropped from critical view. But the 1833 text remains significant in several ways. The biographical details retained since 1818 have been pruned and rephrased, their lighter and more intimate touches (‘She was fond of dancing, and excelled in it’, the listing of her favourite writers, the mention of her deathbed comic verses) giving way to a greater formality and sobriety. The new material includes the anecdote recorded only here of JA’s refusal of the invitation to meet Madame de Staël; finally, Henry supplements what he now feels to be an inadequate record ‘of so talented a woman’ with long passages extracted from ‘a critical journal of the highest reputation’. As David Gilson has recently shown, the published criticisms Henry draws on are from two sources—Maria Jane Jewsbury in the Athenaeum and Richard Whately in the Quarterly Review. In effect, Henry’s selection of their critical perspectives as the summation of his second biographical study set the terms on which readers encountered JA’s writings in the mid-nineteenth century. (See David Gilson, ‘Henry Austen’s “Memoir of Miss Austen”’, Persuasions, 19 (1997), 12–19, and ‘Jane Austen and the Athenaeum Again’, Persuasions, 19 (1997), 20–2.)

  Madame de Staël would be of the party: Henry Austen is our only source for this story of JA’s refusal to meet the French intellectual and novelist Germaine de Staël (for whom see note to p. 111 above). By 1815 JA and de Staël were both publishing with John Murray; but the date to which Henry Austen assigns the meeting that never was, summer 1814 (‘soon after the publication of MP’), was after de Staël’s departure from England. If we are to credit the story, then we must set it back a year, possibly to JA’s London visit of October 1813.

  fastest since she died: the whole of this long quoted paragraph is digested from Maria Jewsbury’s article, ‘Literary Women. No. II. Jane Austen’, Athenaeum, 200 (27 Aug. 1831), 553–4, which Henry Austen selectively adapts (see Gilson, ‘Jane Austen and the Athenaeum Again’, 20–2). What looks like a grammatical error at p. 152 (‘the fellows to whom may be met in the streets’) is also to be found in the Athenaeum version.

  evidently a Christian writer: this paragraph is taken from Richard Whately’s unsigned review of NA and P in the Quarterly Review, 24 (Jan. 1821), 352–76 (at pp. 359–60). There are slight differences in the wording in the Quarterly, and Whately writes ‘Miss Austin’ throughout.

  Cœlebs: a reference to Hannah More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808), a hugely popular moral novel setting out the duties of a model wife.

  Madame D’Arblay… Miss Porter: For D’Arblay and Edgeworth, see notes to pp. 20 and 72 above. Amelia Opie (1769–1853) was the author of domestic novels, Adeline Mowbray (1804) and Simple Tales (1806); Jane Porter (1776–1850) contributed successfully to the vogue for the historical novel with The Scottish Chiefs (1810).

  ANNA LEFROY, ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’ (1864)

  HRO, MS 23M93/97/4, ‘Items found interleaved in the published works and related papers of R. A. Austen-Leigh, 1872–1961’. Anna Lefroy’s letter to her brother JEAL is item 23M93/97/4/104, and described as ‘found in p. 291’. It forms an irregular booklet of fourteen pages (approx. 16.5 x 10.8 cm), made up of three small sheets (pp. 1–6) and two larger sheets, folded down the centre to make pp. 7, 8, 13, 14 (sheet 4) and pp. 9, 10, 11, 12 (sheet 5). The left-hand edges of sheets 1–3 are wrapped round the centrefold and stitched lightly to the back at p. 14. I reproduce for this edition the text as it appears in this fair-copy manuscript, though for ease of reading I have not recorded erased words or page breaks. I have, however, retained irregularities of orthography and punctuation. JEAL took some details (JA and Cassandra walking in pattens in the sloppy lane between Steventon and Deane, JA’s physical appearance, JA’s accompanying Cassandra to the Abbey School) from Anna’s recollections (Memoir, 18, 36, 70), and he quotes extracts from her letter, as ‘the testimony of another niece’ (p. 73), on JA’s gift for storytelling and amusing young children. At some point Anna’s third daughter, Fanny Caroline Lefroy, made copies of her mother’s recollections, and these copies were used by the next generation of biographers. Constance Hill, in her Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends (1902; 2nd edn., 1904), 194–6, quoted, with some discrepancies, perhaps derived from Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s transcription, the central section of Anna Lefroy’s letter (her long-running jo
ke with JA over the novels of Mrs Hunter of Norwich); R. W. Chapman, from another copy made by Fanny Caroline, extracted Anna’s reproduction of JA’s spoof letter addressed to Mrs Hunter, and included it in his edition of JA’s letters (no. 76 in Letters, ed. Le Faye). The Austen-Leigh archive holds the final autograph copy of Anna’s ‘Recollections’, but she also wrote some draft notes for the letter and these stayed with her Lefroy descendants. They were sold, together with Anna Lefroy’s attempt at a continuation of Sanditon, to America in December 1977 and have since been transcribed and edited, as Jane Austen’s Sanditon: A Continuation by her Niece; together with ‘Reminiscences of Aunt Jane’ by Anna Austen Lefroy, ed. Mary Gaither Marshall (1983). It is clear from her transcriptions that Mary Marshall did not know of the final copy of the letter in the Austen-Leigh archive, though she speculates about the status of the drafts from which she works: ‘[a] number of deletions and additions have been made in the manuscript, both at the time of writing and after a later reading; therefore it is probably a copy of the letter she sent to Edward’ (p. 149). Anna’s two draft versions of the ‘Recollections’ differ in some respects from the Austen-Leigh copy, itself a conflation and reordering of the two, most particularly in elaborating on JA’s trustworthiness as a confidant, as told to Anna by her cousin Fanny Knight. (‘Time however, as it always does, brought new impressions, or modification of the old ones; in the latter years of Aunt Jane’s life there grew up an especial feeling between herself & her eldest niece of that family [the Knights]—a confidence placed on one side meeting with sympathy & sound advice on the other—The particular circumstances were never fully known to me, & would not be to the present purpose but the matter was never really revealed to Aunt Cassandra—“To tell Aunt Jane anything I once observed is the same thing as to tell Aunt C. you are mistaken was the reply Aunt Jane is entirely to be trusted[”]—They were so much to each other those Sisters! They seemed to live a life to themselves, & that nobody but themselves knew. I will not say their true but their full feelings & opinions upon any subject’ (draft recollections, ed. M. G. Marshall, pp. 159–60).) This detail is omitted from the final copy of the letter in the Austen-Leigh archive, though it finds its way into Fanny Caroline’s manuscript ‘Family History’ (HRO, MS 23M93/85/2). Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Anna Lefroy’s Original Memories of Jane Austen’, Review of English Studies, NS, 39 (1988), 417–21, first provided a full transcription of the manuscript in the Austen-Leigh archive.